This conversation taxed me more than I realized. All my life I had feared my mother’s death, and now that it was coming I had to give myself over to that fear. Sadly, it overwhelmed everything else. What Helen and I had was both too happy and too difficult to last through the consuming sadness, too enormous, too frightening, too much of a seeming answer at a time when I was figuring out how to live without answers. She and I had both tangled our love too entirely with my mothers’ illness. Swashbuckling was not in the cards. My mother was dying, and I was careless with Helen in the face of that, and she was hurt, and for a while things were uncomfortable between us. Helen and I never actually broke up, but we paused. I paused, anyway. All along I had had to choose between joy and sorrow, and I now selected sorrow gladly because I believed that joy would wait for me around the corner. I think that in the end Helen understood that. I think that in the end I understood that myself. Loneliness is the only and terrible thing; and I had a CD coming out, and a party to plan, and a mother dying. I had made up with Bernard, and now spoke to him from time to time in an effortless fashion. He was an old friend and nothing more; but my easy conversation with him made me believe that romantic love was easily repaired, that cracks in love could be painted out after the fact. I assumed that Helen would be there later on. Besides, I was exhausted, so exhausted that I could hardly think or move or feel, and Helen was hungry for feeling, for all that feeling I had wasted earlier on Nick, that wasn’t there to give anymore. These changes of mood and self wear us out.

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